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[wallworm]

Some really cool news for the Max world. 3ds Max 2017.1 is now out. One thing you'll notice immediately is the naming convention of updates has changed with the Point 1 :)

The main features in this update are two that I've been testing with other beta testers for Autodesk. And they are a couple features that people have wanted for a long time:

BlendedBoxMap:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6opNuqSC5I

DataChannel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgy9ngip7jE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RpDvEncFus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXq6sjTsEGo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN6ppr14l9w

There are other features, too, including the addition of the Arnold renderer and an Asset Library application (which is a separate download). I'm not going to go on about those too much; the asset library is probably useful for some workflows... but I'm personally not sold on it yet. And Arnold integration seems cool except I'm not 100% clear on its long-term licensing model in Max--when I understand it more I'll share some thoughts.

Overall, this update is really great. I already added support for the BlendedBoxMap in Wall Worm's Bitmaps To Materials functions recently. So now if you are using 2017.1+, the Bitmaps To Materials utility will use this texture map instead of the large shader tree.

While I have been a tester for Max, I have primarily still spent most of my time in Max 2016 generally until the last couple of weeks. So I'm not 100% sure that this bug was in 2017 all along or is new--but one bummer at the moment is that Vertex Paint modifier currently has a bug by painting on unwanted vertices. Unless this new installer is different than what we've been testing, that bug is in this release--which is a real bummer for painting blend alphas on displacements in WW. So if you are painting alphas, be careful about the painting as you may find the need to do some touch-ups after your paint strokes.